my boss refused to call an ambulance for an injured coworker (2024)

A reader writes:

I’m wondering if I could get your take on a situation that happened at the elementary school where I teach back in September. It’s been a few months since it happened, but it’s still on everyone’s minds.

On the first day of school, one of my fellow teachers tripped and fell backwards down the concrete steps leading up to the entrance of the school as she was arriving that morning. She split the back of her head open. As the school nurse was assessing the situation, our principal came running over and demanded that the injured teacher be helped to her feet and walked into the school “so the parents and students wouldn’t see her as they begin to arrive for school.” The principal then told everyone who witnessed the incident that they were forbidden to call an ambulance because she did not want to create a scene and scare the kids or worry the parents. The injured teacher was kept in the principal’s office with a wad of paper towels on her head for almost half an hour until most of the kids had been dropped off for the day and the buses had arrived. Then the nurse was finally “allowed” to call someone to take the teacher to the hospital, but it had to be a family member, not EMS. Several phone calls later, the nurse was finally able to get in touch with the teacher’s sister-in-law, who came to pick her up and drive her to the hospital. All in all, it was over an hour between her injury and arriving at the hospital, which is ridiculous because the school is right up the street from the fire department so am ambulance could have gotten there super quickly, and the hospital is only 10-15 minutes away so she literally could have gotten to the hospital in under 20 minutes.

It turns out, she had a concussion (no surprise there) and she needed eight stitches in her head. To my knowledge, she did not lose consciousness but she says she was in such a daze that she went along with what the principal decided instead of advocating for herself. I don’t think she was able to really even speak. She missed a week and a half of work and had residual headaches for a month or so afterward.

We were all flabbergasted that our principal chose to keep her hidden in an office with a head injury until the “right time” to get her to the hospital. The teacher probably should not have even been moved in the first place, and an injury to the head should be treated immediately regardless of the “scene” it might create. Our principal can also be very intimidating, and her decisions override the nurse’s decisions.

We’re all very concerned that she chose to put the appearances of the school ahead of the safety of an injured teacher. I know what she was probably thinking — “these parents won’t leave me alone if they see an ambulance here, they’ll think the school isn’t safe for their children,” etc. And I understand not wanting these helicopter parents breathing down your neck, but this teacher could have had a much worse spinal/head injury than she did, and it shouldn’t be up to the principal to decide when her staff warrants emergency medical care.

We were all shaken after this incident, and worried that if someone else were to get injured in the future it would be handled in a similar way. Jokes have been made like “hey, be careful carrying that box of books, if you drop it on your foot you won’t be allowed to use crutches because it might look bad to the parents,” things like that. Some people say she just made a bad judgment call, probably due to first day of school anxiety, but I worry it speaks more to her priorities than anything. What do you think of this? Was there anything legally wrong with her actions?

Her actions werehorrible.

She denied a staff member needed medical care because she was concerned about appearances. That is a cartoon-villain-level act. Head injuries are serious, and her desire to hide the situation from parents (which is a weird desire to begin with — people fall)could have made the damagefar more serious than it needed to be.

I can’t speak to the legality of her actions — I can’t think of any laws she violated, but you’d need a lawyer to tell you for sure — but there’s no question that what she didn’t wasn’t okay from an ethical or human perspective. Of course the rest of you are worried about how any future injuries will be handled, and it’s reasonable to speak up and insist on a change to the way these incidents are handled.

This is a perfect time to use the advice I talked about earlier this week, about how to speak up as a group when you want your employer to do something differently. There’s power in numbers, and this warrants using it (and as many people are noting in the comment section, since you’re at a school, you probably have a union to do this through).

Read an update to this letter here.